high summer, deep shade

My focus has been on the dye pots lately. There is so much to gather, so many things are peaking, flowering, on the verge of fading. My goal is to have a studio full of plant dyed fiber that I'll mix up into yarn during the fall and winter.

It's not just dyestuffs, though. We found a dandelion patch on a walk to the cemetery a few weeks ago. The red stemmed kind that I swear taste better than the usual green stemmed sort. It's also a good mushroom patch. There were scads of puffballs, even a few alien looking orchids. They look like orange-red asparagus before they bloom.

I don't have a shop update this week. Toby's scarf took up all my productivity. I do have a few new things to introduce. A new twist on the spinning kits, maybe some new yarn. On a less than fibery note, I've also been Desire Mapping. I'm not usually one to go in for woo, but the woman behind the method passes my bullshit test and the message speaks to me so I'm giving it a go. My core desired feelings are: illuminated, shakti, prolific and quixotic.

emPHAsis on the art

I hate making up words to describe myself and what I do. For the longest time I didn't consider myself an artist, maybe a writer, but not an artist. There was no future in that. So I've gotten good at circling around, coating it with practical applications and poetic license. It feels sticky and gimicky at worst, far too prescious at best. When I started all this fiber business for fun and profit I told myself success would be being able to call myself a fiber artisan without feeling like I was lying. But even when i got to that point on this journey it felt untrue. Yes, the end result of what I sell often looks like a hat or a scarf or the materials for others to make the same, but the making part never felt utilitarian. It's always been my kind of art. The deeply process-based sort.

 

That's been my number since day one. I'm a notorious medium jumper. I've dipped a toe in oils, clay, photography before this and it's always been that flow state, like a trance, that feels like I'm doing the right thing. It has almost nothing to do with the finished object, if that turns out nice too its a plus but it's not where the joy comes from. I find that embedded in the doing.

Applied to fiber I've found materials that fit my meandering nature. I can go from wildcrafting to weaving in the space of a day. I can explore scientific journals for information on dyes or play with color and texture to mix a sukoshi batch or get me to a craft show and infect other folks with this notion of learning to do things from scratch. There is so much to explore here and I'm glad to have peers out there. I discover more and more every day. Artists and crafters and all the inbetweeners, too. I'm going to pick a side now, though, imagined yet unnamed consequences be damned. I'm an artist, a fiber artist. A process-based fiber artist specializing in eco-ethical methodology - if you want to get fancy. But artist works just as well.

the yay..uh oh

I felt pretty smug at the beginning of the week when I took this shot. My out box is nearly full, ready to deliver to shops and be listed on Etsy. Then I found out I had made it into the Longmont Farmer's Market this season. They do an art market add-on every fourth Saturday. I'm so excited to be a part of it. Doing a regular market has been one of my goals. But...suddenly my box felt kind of small. Really small, actually. I've been busy making ever since. Carding, spinning and weaving. I do love a deadline and the first market is at the end of April. 

Weaving may be my new favorite thing to do. It's soothingly meditative and goes by relatively quickly compared to knitting. The best part though, is that I feel like I've found an ideal way to show off the colors and textures in my handspun. It's kind of like creating a canvas and a painting at the same time. One of my goals is to have a pile of these for the first market.

 I don't want to get out of the habit of stocking my online shop, so I'm still going to list things on Etsy as I make them. One question that gets asked a lot is whether a given item on my table can be found elsewhere and generally I always mean to list things when I get home but rarely get around to it in a timely fashion. No more of that. This week I have batts, yarn and a woven scarf.

skillsharing

 This is the time of year I find myself knitting and knitting and knitting for craft shows. My goal is to have ten pairs of fingerless gloves on my table, among other things like hats and spinning kits and yarn. I just finished these gloves last night. They're extra long and all handspun. I'm tempted to keep them for myself, I like them so much. But then I'd have to make one more pair to meet my self-imposed quota. Meh.

 I decided to try and overwiner our tuscan blue rosemary. I'm not sure if it could have hacked the minus whatever-it-gets-to-here nights. It's flowering now and that generally makes me wonder if I'm making it happy or stressing out so bad that its making itself pretty in a desperate attempt at reproducing before it dies on me. I might try cutting it back a bit and making starts from the cuttings. I got the idea from this Juniper Moon Farms blog post.

 I've been making time to play with natural dyes lately, too. I'm brushing up because I'm teaching a yarn dyeing workshop with the Living Arts School on December 7th. The focus is on locally available dyestuffs, plants you could find growing wild plus a few you could easily incorporate in your own garden here in Colorado. I'll have a mix of prepared and whole plants and go over the various ways to tweak a dye bath to get more than one color/shade from each plant.

By way of example, here are some examples of a few of the dyes we'll be playing with. The browns are from black walnut hulls gathered in Wash Park in Denver. From left to right its been dyed onto tussah silk, hemp and alpaca. The pink(hemp) and orange(silk) are from the same bath of safflower petals. You can get a yellow from the same dye pot, too. The nice thing about safflower is that you can do the whole process cold.

This is from an indigo vat I've stashed in a corner by the stove. The fiber is silk that has been sitting in situ as the vat ferments and the gray-blue color has touches of red where the madder root took hold of the fiber, too. It's back in the vat and hopefully it'll get blue-er. I like the storm cloud quality of this stage too, though. The blue we will explore in the class will be more traditional, from woad and should produce a truer blue than this one.



 The jar is full of alkanet root that's been soaking in some Everclear that I found in the cupboard when we moved in. Alkanet isn't water soluble but alcohol will draw it out and create a deep purple/red color. This one doesn't exactly fit into the "local" rubric, but I'll probably bring some to the class anyway in case someone wants to try it. It gets used in natural cosmetics commercially and grows wild in Europe. It's a lot harder to find seeds for it here but I've seen them on Etsy now and again. This batch is currently evaporating out as I add snow to it so I can dye fiber in it without turning it into alkanet flambe.

aspen & nettle

     The dye vats were calling to me after I finally finished a pair of custom gloves I've been sloooowly working on for the past few weeks.  I can't wait to show them to the person who asked for them. They're a longer version of the striped gloves I usually make for craft shows, but the requested yarn is also bulkier. This made them much warmer and makes me think more of hiking/biking than typing but they turned out beautifully all the same.

  
     The vats of aspen and nettle I have going are not beautiful. I let them ferment as they cold-process, leaving the dyestuffs in for as long as my nose can stand it. They've reached peak smelliness with that scuzzy mold on top. The nettle is the primary offender. The word putrid comes to mind before I even lift the lid. While that sucks for air quality in my kitchen, it also means that the pigments and the fiber are getting along famously. I finally cracked and cycled the first round of fiber out of the nettle and aspen this morning.

     I worked outside on the porch to minimize any lingering zombie stench, not to mention the mess. These chickadees were hanging out with me the whole time. Well, they were mostly hanging out in the aspen trees and the bird feeder. But, when I stopped for a bit to watch them one did get curious enough to investigate my shoes.



     Specific fibers interact with natural dyes in differing ways for lots of reasons. One thing I've noticed is that silk will take up color with vibrancy while wool is more subdued. This batch was a good illustration of that general rule. The silk and alpaca came out of the aspen bath dyed a bright acidy yellow and the hampshire wool came out of the nettle a pale sort of greenish yellow. There was still one more step. I started bottles of copper and iron tea last fall for afterbaths and mordanting.  This was my first opportunity to play with them. On the aspen-dyed silk and with the copper, at least, the effect was pretty magical. It went from that acid yellow to deep green. The nettle...eh. It was a deeper, kaiser green last year but then I also pretty much forgot about it for a month or two, leaving it in the closet. And I used scottish blackface wool, which takes up dye almost as greedily as silk does. Maybe I'll try that for round two.

From left to right, the aspen-dyed alpaca and silk with alum moradant, then iron afterbath and copper afterbath. The next photo is the nettle-dyed hampshire wool with the same progression: alum, iron afterbath, copper afterbath.

A litany of this week's accomplishments

Finished spinning up the Spaulding Pink batch for my sweater.

Started and almost completed a child sized sweater for the shop.

Knit up one out of a family pack of four hats for the White Buffalo Farm fundraiser.

And mailed out two custom orders I picked up at craft markets last month.

Sold my last skein of Summer People: May to a wonderful traveling couple I met while working at the shop in Georgetown this weekend.

Updated Anais' unschooling Tumblr.

Roasted coffee in my popcorn popper. Got my oven back and made some pizza, too. Tomorrow begins a week of dyeing and some last foraging before winter and generally gearing up for restocking for the holidays.

Experimenting

I don't really think of myself as a weaver, not yet anyway. I get the basic concept and I can muddle my way through setting up an inkle loom or a frame loom but anything more complicated than that and I'm apt to throw up my hands in despair. So, naturally, I decided that the best use of my time prepping for upcoming shows in a month would be to play around with weaving and developing some kind of wearable prototype. Call it creative procrastination. I'm not even sure how you're supposed to finish woven objects and measuring may as well be some form of higher math the way I avoid it. Hence, when I took what I thought was going to be a cuff-type bracelet off of my daughter's conscripted bead loom, I ended up with this:

Too short for even a bubbie bracelet and what to do with the ends? I was feeling cranky with myself at this point because I had put a few days into weaving this...whatever it was. I played around with it and tried to decide if I could salvage it. Was it mini-fiber art?

A bookmark? Or maybe a dollhouse rug?

That's pretty much where it's stayed, exiled to my kids' room while I moved on to other forms of creative procrastination. Like mastering the fine art of hammering snaps together so I can get around the pesky step of sewing them on. Which was how I discovered what my actual new product is going to be. I had another experiment in weaving languishing on my inkle loom, a long not quite scarf of a thing that I thought I might squish together and apart into a couple of bracelets. Instead, I freed the entire thing from the loom and tucked in all the loose ends. When that resulted in a fairly polished looking loosely woven ribbon of fabric I took a chance on the hammer and the snaps. They went on with relative ease and I realized I had a belt, specifically a child-sized belt and a perfect sort of accessory for dress up clothes that tend to come several sizes too big or playsilks turned into togas. I've been letting my eldest daughter wear it to see how it holds up under the pressure of real day-to-day use. And I have no idea how many people are in the market for one of these, fabulous as I think they are. But I think that, in future, I'll be a little less cranky with myself for needing a day to just fiddle around with this idea and that. If I hadn't given myself some time to play who knows how long it would have taken me to come up with this?

“This post is part of the Exploration Party – a celebration of our inner explorers, led by Tara Swiger of Explore You. You can find other tales of adventure from artists, crafters, writers and biz smarties – and share your own story – right here.” - See more at: http://taraswiger.com/exploration-party-invite/#sthash.weGXzT8c.dpuf

 

Craft shows

I'm starting to line up a few market dates, just fall ones so far. I plan on doing at least one out of state show this winter, but I haven't decided where, yet. Maybe Detroit? Maybe somewhere in the Pacific Northwest? It depends on who wants me and how far we can afford to travel. I'm focusing on knitting things up since those get sold the quickest so I won't be updating the yarn sections of Etsy shop much between now and then. I'll be debuting my indigo dyed yarns and I hope to have a few more sorts of jewelry, too.

The two dates I have so far are for the Firefly Handmade Autumn Market on September 2st & 22nd in Boulder, CO and the Paonia Mountain Harvest Festival on September 26th through the 29th. Actually, the market part is just the 28th and 29th, but there are lots of cool things going on all weekend. Farm tours and live music and a kids' bike parade...I'm excited to dust off Bill and take the whole family up there. Paonia has been calling to me for a while now and I'm glad I was able to be a part of this event.

What's in a name?

There are many reasons we humans come up with for naming things. Familial lineage, descriptive ease or legal requirements are a few that come to mind. I seem to aim for obscure references, which probably means that half of my psyche is perpetually stuck in art school. In fact, that's exactly where I ran into the minimal sentence that is my Doing Business As name.

For a few glorious, frustrating months I attended Bennington College in Vermont. I was thousands of miles from everything I was used to and my whole world flipped upside down. Pretty much literally. Back in Colorado I was able to put minimal effort into getting good grades, but I was about as disconnected from my peers as a kid could get. Plopped into this new environment, surrounded by trustifarians and art nerds, I became overwhelmed at the mention of assignments and a compulsive party-goer. I had more new friends than my entire grade school career produced and yet I couldn't bring myself to write more than a paragraph. I loved Bennington, but I hated who it was turning me into. I ended up leaving after only one term. I packed a lot of memories with me though-and flyers.

Being the arty Mecca that it is a lot of the events around campus were advertised with handmade, hand printed posters. Bands coming through, dance recitals, movie nights were commonly announced in layers of screen print or blueprint with a dash of snark. And that's where Andy Warhol comes in, and Eat Agar. Just before the end of the term a Warhol festival was going down, complete with theme parties and a full-length showing of Empire. That's when I picked up this gem:

It apealed to me in the way an obscure reference often puts a sparkle in the eye of a budding hipster- agar agar being vegan gelatin and regular gelatin being one of the main components of unprocessed camera film. In high school I had come to the conclusion that if I wanted life to be like a movie that it was up to me to write and direct. I decided to make 'eat agar' my creedo, an art mantra.

When the time came to give my fiber hobby turned microbusiness a name I hesitated because it doesn't have much to do with yarn or fiber in general. But it does have everything to do with my worldview, still; post-hipster that I am. Deep down I am still the girl who believes you have to make your own magic. Besides, when have I ever been one for caving to the obvious?

 

Formulaic

 

I had a few firsts this last week. My first custom yarn order, which necessitated my first attempt at intentionally recreating a couple of colors. It's a task I had ever really considered before. The thing is, I have these color formulas I use for the low-impact synthetic dyes. I keep them written down on a few dye-stained pages in my master notebook. They're little bits of arithmetic for the colors I've come to use over and over. It's kind of like having my own personal pack of crayons, some with names I've given them myself. Names like rusty grape or broken black. But for all the times I've used them it never occurred to me to notice how close one batch has been to another. Variation is kind of built into the process. In fact I love being able to invite chaos in. The surprises generally outweigh the frustration and I know of no better way to learn something new than to just leap and take notes as I go along. Different fibers take up dyes at different rates and saturations and I have a habit of putting random combinations of fibers in the jars with each round of dyeing. So color me surprised when I got both colors I needed on the first try! I guess from now on I'll have to admit that, while I feel letting chaos into my process is essential, it's a controlled sort of chaos...with compulsory sparkles.